More than one in five people were living in poverty in San Bernardino County last year while the poverty rate in Los Angeles County didn’t lag far behind, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

San Bernardino County’s poverty rate was estimated to be 20.6 percent in 2014, up from 19.1 percent the previous year and up from 18 percent in 2010, according to the data released Wednesday night. In Los Angeles County, 18.7 percent of residents were estimated to live in poverty in 2014, roughly the same as the previous year and up from 17.5 percent in 2010. Both counties surpassed California’s statewide official poverty rate of 16.4 percent in 2014.

While inflation-adjusted median household incomes have been declining and poverty rates are up in much of Southern California, the flip side is that unemployment rates are falling and educational attainment rates are seeing some improvement, said Robert Kleinhenz, chief economist with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

“We have a mixed bag of results with the 2014 data,” Kleinhenz said. “Part of the reason for that is some of the results are still very much affected by the recession. … Technically, it ended in 2009 at the national level, but I think it lingered here longer. We began to go down the road to recovery later here in Southern California than other parts of the U.S. did.”

The inflation-adjusted median household income in Los Angeles County was estimated to be $55,746 in 2014, which was about the same as last year but down from $57,225 in 2010. In San Bernardino County, the median household income was estimated to be $52,041 last year, slightly down from the 2013 figure of $52,940 and significantly down from $57,096 in 2010. Both counties fell below the statewide median household income of $61,993 in 2014.

Nationally, inflation-adjusted household incomes have fallen “fairly consistently” dating back to 1999 and the figures in L.A. and San Bernardino County are a part of this long-term trend, Kleinhenz said.

“Even during the pre-recession area, wage increases tended to barely keep up with inflation if at all,” Kleinhenz said, noting that middle-wage and low-wage jobs tended to lose ground against inflation. Higher wage jobs, which often involve skills, education and technical training, “was the only area that kept up with or managed to beat inflation over the last 10 years or so.”

But Kleinhenz said it was likely that there would be “material improvement” in 2015 and 2016 as the fundamentals of the economy have improved “quite substantially” in 2015.

“We have new record-high levels of jobs that beat old records before the recession,” he said. “We also see wage gains happening in ways we haven’t seen in quite some time. We are seeing wage gains that are beating inflation so that’s a good sign.”

In addition, with the improvement of local and state governments’ finances, their ability to provide poverty assistance is also improving, he said.

L.A. County’s median household income is lower than California as a whole largely because the county has lower levels of educational attainment than the state, Kleinhenz said. About 30 percent of those 25 and older in L.A. County and 19 percent of those in San Bernardino County earned at least a bachelor’s degree in 2014 compared with 31.7 percent of those statewide, according to the new data.

“Our challenge here in L.A. County, and for much of Southern California is to look at our educational attainment levels and what they mean for our population’s ability to take on the kinds of jobs that are out there in the 21st century,” he said, noting that students in middle schools and high schools need to start thinking about careers.

Like other counties in the state, L.A. and San Bernardino counties have seen significant reductions in the number of those without health insurance, according to the data. In L.A. County, it was estimated that 84.4 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population had health insurance in 2014, up from 78.7 percent in 2013 and up from 76.5 percent in 2010. In San Bernardino County, it was estimated that 86.2 percent of the civilian noninstitutionalized population had health insurance in 2012, up from 81 percent in 2013 and 78.4 percent in 2010.

The census data show that California had the fifth-largest drop in the number of uninsured, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, the statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition. In 2013, California had the seventh-highest number of people without health insurance in the nation. Now it’s down to 20. But that’s not a total success, Wright warned.

“It also indicates how much more we can do,” he said. “There’s more we can do with enrollment, more we can do with covering the remaining uninsured, including the undocumented. That’s a bigger problem with California.”

Earlier this year, California agreed to cover all income-eligible children regardless of immigration status in Medi-Cal starting in 2015.

The Affordable Care Act had a significant impact on lowering the number of uninsured Americans across the nation, Wright said, but especially in California. The Golden State launched open enrollment on its own health insurance exchange in October 2013. In addition, California was better prepared to help subsidize coverage. More than 1.1 million Californians enrolled into Medi-Cal in 2014.

Meanwhile, the proportion of foreign-born residents from Asian countries continued to increase in Los Angeles County, while the proportion of those from Latin American countries continued to fall. The percentage of Asian foreign born in L.A. County was estimated to be 37.8 percent in 2014, up from 35.9 percent in 2010. The percentage of Latin American-foreign born in the county fell from 54 percent to 52 percent in the same period, according to the data.

This can be largely attributed to an improving economy and declining fertility rate in Mexico as well as fewer job opportunities, such as construction jobs, for these immigrants in the United States, said Walter Schwarm, demographer with the Demographic Research Unit for the California Department of Finance.

“If we look at immigrants themselves, a much larger proportion are coming from Asia than Latin America, a reversal of previous trends that we had in the early 2000s and in the 1990s, where predominantly migration into L.A. County was from Latin America,” he said.

Brenda Gazzar is a multilingual multimedia reporter who has worked for a variety of news outlets in California and in the Middle East since 2000. She has covered a range of issues, including breaking news, immigration, law and order, race, religion and gender issues, politics, human interest stories and education. Besides the Los Angeles Daily News and its sister papers, her work has been published by Reuters, the Denver Post, Ms. Magazine, the Jerusalem Post, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, The Cairo Times and others. Brenda speaks Spanish, Hebrew and intermediate Arabic and is the recipient of national, state and regional awards, including a National Headliners Award and one from the Associated Press News Executives' Council. She holds a dual master's degree in Communications/Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.